Haus

‘All that interests me is the grey areas, the passages and tonal sequences, the pictorial spaces, overlaps and interlockings. If I had any way of abandoning the object as the bearer of this structure, I would immediately start painting abstracts’ (G. Richter, ‘Notes 1964–65’, in D. Elger and H-U. Obrist (eds.), Gerhard Richter, TEXT: Writings, Interviews and Letters 1961–2007, London 2009, p. 37).

‘They and others like them – as well as the earlier Administrative Building [CR: 39] of 1964 – are reflections on the new face of Europe and on the other surviving remnants of the old one’ (R. Storr, ‘Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting’, in Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2002, p. 42).

Painted in 1965, Gerhard Richter’s Haus presents an early exploration of the space between abstraction and figuration. A mesmerizing example of the artist’s photo-painting practice, it takes its place alongside the exceptional works produced during this year, including Onkel Rudi (Lidice Collection), Frau die Treppe herabgehend (The Art Institute, Chicago), Motorboot (Kunstmuseum, Basel), Mutter und Tochter (Ludwig Galerie Schloss Oberhausen), Schwimmerin (Froehlich Collection, Stuttgart), Portrait Prof. Zander and Tante Marianne. The barely-traceable blurred head and shoulders of a fleeting figure shifts in and out of focus before a series of silent, vacant windows, variously opened and closed to the street below. As foreground and background oscillate, both figure and building appear to unhinge, floating between concrete representation and formal reduction. As in many works from this period, such as Zwei Fiat, 1964 (Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden), the movement of the figure is captured in the obfuscating sweep of the artist’s brush. The strict blockade of windows is animated by subtle gradations of light and shade, reflecting the constantly moving metropolis that lies beyond the viewer’s gaze. Rendered with monochromatic intensity, this imposing façade foreshadows Richter’s exploration of architectural constructs in his later series of Stadtbilder (Townscapes), begun in 1968, as well as the neatly-arranged Türen (Doors) and 4 Glasscheiben (4 Panes of Glass) of 1967. The windows of Haus perform formally, divorced from their function: like the gridded formations of the Colour Charts, initiated the following year, their arrangement strains towards the abstract ‘ground zero’ that Richter was to repeatedly wrestle with throughout his practice. With all transparency obscured, Richter’s windows are barred gateways to hidden worlds, yielding no clue as to what lies beyond. In this way, the work hints at questions of vision and reality that, for Richter, lay at the core of the relationship between photography and painting – a dialogue that was to drive his work over the following decades.

The work was originally derived from a photographic source image depicting a figure, caught in motion, approaching the building on a busy street. Indeed, Richter had originally painted a full version of this scene – photographed alongside other works in the artist’s studio in 1965 – before bisecting his canvas at the base of the windows, leaving only the upper portion of the figure intact. In so doing, the gridded window structure takes its place as the work’s central compositional feature. The pre- and post-War architectural landscape was to become an important subject within the artist’s photo-painting practice, documented extensively through photographs in his personal compendium ‘Atlas’ and expanded into a lengthy meditation on buildings, infrastructures and townscapes in the Stadtbilder series. Speaking of these works, Robert Storr asserts that ‘they and others like them – as well as the earlier Administrative Building [CR: 39] of 1964 – are reflections on the new face of Europe and on the other surviving remnants of the old one’ (R. Storr, ‘Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting’, in Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2002, p. 42). The fluctuating pictorial surface of Haus captures something of this transience, presenting a world caught between shifting states. Combining the zeitgeist of post-War architectural austerity with unresolved compositional ambiguities, the work is marked by a lingering sense of poignancy. ‘Richter is no longer concerned solely with copying the image’, wrote Rolf Gunther Dienst during the year of the present work’s execution. ‘Through his manner of representation, Richter wants to awaken deep-seated emotions and associations in the viewer, who may not have been aware of them before’ (R. G. Dienst , Pop Art. Eine kritische Information, Wiesbaden 1965, p. 70).

Richter had begun his series of photo-paintings in 1962 when, no longer satisfied with his earlier abstract work, he turned to creating paintings based on found photographs. Rooted in his generation’s reaction against the apparent lie of figurative representation, the artist sought to create a new autonomy for painting by imitating the reproductive nature of photography. By deliberately replicating the blurring normally associated with failed camerawork, Richter sought to create a new painterly language that questioned the very notion of objective vision. It was through this intense study of the relationship between image and reality that Richter became increasingly fascinated with the idea that abstraction and figuration represent two sides of the same coin. ‘All that interests me is the grey areas, the passages and tonal sequences, the pictorial spaces, overlaps and interlockings’, wrote Richter at the time of the present work. ‘If I had any way of abandoning the object as the bearer of this structure, I would immediately start painting abstracts’ (G. Richter, ‘Notes 1964–65’, in D. Elger and H-U. Obrist (eds.), Gerhard Richter, TEXT: Writings, Interviews and Letters 1961–2007, London 2009, p. 37). Haus constitutes an important demonstration of this claim. Indeed, as the figure is reduced to an ethereal trace and the building is subsumed by its formal properties, we are reminded of the inherently unstable nature of all representation.